Why friendships are essential to your mental health

Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash

Our journey to happiness is one we make with companions. One of our most important and rewarding experiences is the love and friendship we share with our dear ones. Of course, we often share positive relationships with our friends, spouses, and other family members. Still, our circle may also include co-workers, teachers, and anyone else we regularly contact.

Dr. Martin Seligman is the founder of positive psychology, the science of what makes individuals and communities thrive. Seligman identifies relationships as one of the five critical pillars of happiness in his model of well-being. Called PERMA, Seligman’s model includes Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. According to research, while each pillar is integral for a well-balanced life, thriving relationships appear to be the most critical determinant of happiness.

People with “strong ties to friends and family and commitment to spending time with them” have the highest levels of well-being.” (Diener & Seligman, 2002).

Social psychologist Chris Peterson, a colleague of Seligman's and another pioneer in the field, said you could sum up positive psychology in three words: "Other people matter."

In positive psychology, ‘relationships’ refers to good relationships with others. Individual and changing over time, relationships can be challenging to define. Signs of positive relationships include:

• respect and trust
• companionship and shared activities
• open communication
• mutual support
• mutual benefit
• positive emotions for both parties
• shared values, views, or aspirations.

Clearly, the more we develop and nurture our close social relationships, the better we and others will be physically and psychologically. Fortunately, positive psychology has set a few empirically backed ways to do this, both in friendships and with romantic partners. Here are just three examples of positive interventions to help in this domain.

#1 Random Acts of Kindness.
On one day of the coming week, perform five acts of kindness. The actions can be big or small for the same person or five different people. In addition to improving the lives of others, research demonstrates that participants who performed these random acts of kindness on a given day for six weeks experienced a significant increase in well-being.

#2 Active Constructive Responding.
Try to be a supportive responder in the next opportunity you get with a loved one. Supportive responses are best defined through Active Constructive Responding (ACR). Research suggests that only active-constructive, enthusiastic, caring, and supportive answers are positively associated with the well-being of the person sharing the news.

#3 The Gift of Time. 
In an upcoming week, you can schedule to meet up with three people you care about, above and beyond your usual planned activities. When we’re busy, and let’s face it, we’re always busy, it is easy to sacrifice quality time with others instead of other tasks. While sometimes time-consuming, connecting with others and nurturing positive relationships are fundamental aspects of well-being. People who did this activity showed improved well-being even one month later, and the results lasted longer for those who gave gifts of time.

If you ask evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, friendship is quantifiable. Dunbar, author of Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships, is the originator of “Dunbar’s Number,” which, at its barebones, refers to the number of relationships a person can maintain. Dunbar suggests that the number is 150 on average. 

“Dunbar’s Number” suggests this: even though we can have many overall relationships, we can only foster so many significant ones, no matter how many we’d like. It’s just not possible.

Of course, friendship has been in very short supply this last year. COVID and the lockdown have restricted our interactions with our friends and family. So we’ll want to get out and renew those things. One of the exciting things about friendships is that they're incredibly dynamic. People are constantly changing places, changing layers in our friendship circles. And so, we can expect that some of these relationships will have changed. Some will have dropped down to lower levels. New ones will have come to replace them. And that's a perfectly normal feature of the nature of friendships.